After All These Years: Laisha Rosnau’s Our Familiar Hunger

Rosnau’s book is divided into four sections that focus on three generations of women. The poems move back and forth between the present legacy of those immigrant women and the past experiences and risks that drove them here in the first place. What is amazing―behind these stories and voices―is that the strength demanded of these women surfaces over and over again, and reminds the reader of a hunger that persists and a silence and invisibility that persist as well. Rosnau tries to locate this longing and invisibility in “Still Hungry”:

… they filled their heads with dark sky
above water, lined their stomachs with
the sharp edge of stars.
/ … /
Our grandmothers’ mouths became
the mouths of our children,
wide open.
/ … /
Often our hunger is the only noise in the room.

Behind this hunger and invisibility is, not surprisingly, a fortitude that arises because of such deprivation, and Rosnau captures this strength and power throughout the book. She points to a passionate sense of abandonment and dare-devil sexuality in, for example, “Let’s Call It”: “Let’s appear on bridge decks about to jump, / or mid-fall, our bodies weighted with air. / Let’s appear in hospital beds and psych wards / and while we’re there let’s not say anything.”

In another poem, “The Black Sea,” the long, bloody reach of immigrant sacrifice is envisioned in a surreal tapestry of birth imagery:

We held our stomachs as we disembarked,
queasy with birthing ourselves
into a new world. They pulled our hands
from our waists, pushed gemstones to our palms.
Skyscrapers scratched a dry heat
and the wealthy dragged sharp objects
along our skin until we bled jewel tones:
Ruby, garnet, sapphire, onyx.

The wild power and fierce birthing are so strong in these poems that the reader begins to see where these risks and hunger and silences have gone: into creating a sometimes subterranean, crazy wilfulness that we are all grateful for now because we know it is part of a present that exists because of such boldness: “Let’s make an industry / of ourselves, or not. Let’s rest / when we need to / Let’s marry men called Jack and George / and call it a day.”

Rosnau’s careful use of concrete, earthy situations and crisp imagery-driven fields of vision, combined with her strong, rhythmic phrasing, keep these poems deft, edgy and boisterous with surprise, as in “When We Haven’t Had Enough,” where she fuses past and present with such gleeful verve: “When we haven’t had enough of being hit, / When we haven’t had enough of being licked, /         When we haven’t had enough of being liked / or clicked on, we ask for more.”

These poems have a strength that reminds me of poets whose work anticipates Rosnau’s in different ways, beginning with Pat Lowther, Leona Gom and Kristjana Gunnars, and eventually including Stephanie Bolster and Roo Borson. Our Familiar Hunger is a shimmering achievement. It reaches for a story we do not hear enough, but need to hear.

 

John Lent has published ten books of poetry and fiction and non-fiction. A new book of poems, A Matins Flywheel, will be released by Thistledown Press in 2019. He is also a singer-songwriter whose latest CD is Strange Ground. Lent lives in Vernon, BC and is part of a lively writing community there.

 

ARC HITS THE HEART HARD.

Skip to content